Flipping back and forth from the slavery-powered world of horse racing in Lexington, Kentucky, and cotton picking in Mississippi and Louisiana in the mid1800s and that of art curation and archeology at the Smithsonian Institution in 2019 makes for interesting cultural clashes in this new novel by the acclaimed Australian/American writer. The posh life of New York aristocracy, horsemen, and art connoisseurs and dealers over the ages is presented in detail; there is a Canadian connection as the slave groom of the famous horse eventually finds freedom and family life in rural Ontario.
Most of the story, though described as fiction, is based on facts, with the names of the characters, both human and equine being real heroes or villains of the sometimes corrupt monied horse racing community, and even the mystery of the skeleton that was found abandoned at the Smithsonian and is now at the Lexington International Museum of the Horse is factual.
The provenance and value of old paintings of a racehorse and a colt that had been lost and found several times forms the linking backbone of the plot which is intricately interwoven with tensions within a slave-owner/emancipation-advocating mixed family in Lexington, and of the chase to return a slave groom fleeing to the north on the prized steed he so loved. One painting is eventually found in the hands of a naive New York maid and is evaluated by the billionaire Mellons and Jackson Pollock, which seemed to me to be a somewhat contrived plot twist to include and discuss the lives of the rich and famous, but is apparently factual. The author has researched this story carefully. She also manages to weave the infamous Jesse James into the party of murderous Union horse thieves.
The equine hero of the story after a stellar but short racing career, became the famous ancestor of many real famous race horses, including General Robert E. Lee’s steed and even some recent famous racehorses. The disruption of many relationships and the alienation of friends by the Civil War is dramatically described, and the continuing racism is dramatized by the shooting of an unarmed star black Yale arts student by a cop in 2019.
The butchery of the English language in the lingo of the illiterate southerners is captured colourfully and the writing reflects the complex communication style of the times. The feverish excitement of the crowd of bettors in the grandstands, which I have witnessed at Keeneland in Lexington, but could not get enthused about, is memorably described. All of my early memories of horses were of Monty and Mollie, a team of black utilitarian Percheron farm horses pulling the sleigh with the big tank through the maple sugar bush to which we carried pails of sap, or taking the whole family wrapped in horsehair blankets to town in the cutter when the snow was too deep for cars, or pulling various farm implements not yet adapted to the tractor. But recreational bareback riding was not to their liking and I was thrown off more than once; horse races were only for the town fall fair.
The unwritten bond, communication, and love between horse and groom is heartwarming and well described with the slave groom choosing to remain in that role rather than buy his freedom and be separated from his steed.
An immense improvement over the author’s earlier rather self-contradictory Nine Parts of Desire, this tale is, in my estimation, right up there, in a totally different context, on a par with Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt and Jodie Picoult’s Small Great Things, when it comes to giving readers an account of the sordid history of slavery and continuing troubled race relations in America with deep insight into the elite snobbish world of thoroughbred horse racing added in. Well deserving of the Fiction of the Year award that Book Browse reviewers awarded it.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Thanks, Book Browse.
The Passionate Reader 